The loss of 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14 brought a divided nation together, but for how long?

Remember Election Night, when maps of the United States on every TV screen showed half the states colored in blue, and the other half in red?

I thought about it even more this week after the passing of U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, 88, on Dec. 17. He was remembered Friday inside the National Cathedral in Washington by President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, Sen. Harry Reid, Veteran’s Affairs Sec. Eric Shinseki and former President Bill Clinton.

I was privileged to meet the senator while working for another great U.S. senator, Dale Bumpers, in the summer of 1989. While interns of the Charleston senator’s office were enjoying lunch, Sen. Inouye came by to say hello to his friend and Democratic colleague.

“I just wanted to tell you what a great boss you have,” Inouye said to us. Bumpers later told us working with the Hawaii senator was one the reasons he stayed in the U.S. Senate.

That’s the way Washington D.C. was back in the day. They would go toe-to-toe on the Senate or House floor, but members of Congress respected each other away from the battlefields. I don’t know what happened, but that comraderie seems to have left the Beltway and washed into the Potomac.

Inouye became Hawaii’s senator in 1962, three years after the state joined the United States. His last word was reportedly “aloha.”

Inouye won the Medal of Honor after he served in the European theater in World War II when some Japanese Americans faced prejudices at home, with many detained in camps for years out of fear of foreign infiltrators. But the senator rose from war hero to an accomplished lawmaker from the Aloha State.

However, the most beautiful tribute to the longest-serving sitting senator and second-longest serving senator in U.S. history came when an old colleague and friend came to visit while he laid in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas not only paid his respects, but the Republican confined to a wheelchair got up and walked to Inouye’s flag-draped casket to salute the senator of Japanese descent. Dole later said he got up because, “I didn’t want my friend to see me in a wheelchair.”

For decades, these warriors battled for their constituents, their states, their country so we would not be divided as those blue and red states on those maps showed on Election Night 2012.

As we say goodbye to a year in which the top story was mass shootings, and as we say goodbye to truly great Americans like Sen. Inouye and all those men, women and children taken from us too soon, we must come together and settle our differences. It has been done before, and it can happen again.

If we don’t fix our divided nation today, if we cannot rebuild the destroyed homes and businesses today, if we cannot heal our wounds today, than what will happen tomorrow, next week, next year?

This is my wish for not only Christmas, but for 2013. We can do so much together as one country, under God, the greatest nation on Earth, than if we remain divided.